Latest Car News in India

Monday, July 09, 2012

Maruti steps up exports to utilize its petrol car production

India no doubt is now a proven heaven for diesel cars. You launch an affordable offering in diesel and witness people making beeline at the showrooms. Maruti did it with Ertiga and received tremendous response, Renault did it with Duster and got overwhelming response and there are innumerable other examples. Now that Indian market is diesel car driven, car makers such as Maruti India that is primarily a petrol car maker is exploring new markets for its petrol cars.

Two markets have been primarily identified and these are Africa and South East Asia. This will help Maruti utilize its petrol car production capacity and will help earn more as the rupee value is currently below Rs 56 a dollar. Currently, Maruti is exporting Maruti Ertiga, Maruti A Star, Maruti Swift and other cars to several countries from India and a further boost in exports will mean that the car maker will be able to utilize the petrol car production capacity. Notably, with the shift in focus on diesel cars and rising petrol prices there is significant decline in the demand of petrol cars. Resultantly, Maruti had to cut down production of cars at its facilities recently.

Significantly, being the largest car maker in India, Maruti has an installed capacity of producing over 1.25 million cars a year. Maruti has sold only 70 percent of the petrol cars it had produced and while out of the total 96,600 cars it sold in June, over 40 percent were diesel cars. Earlier the proportion of petrol and diesel car sales used to be 75: 25 or so as per a rough estimate but it has increased upto 40 percent for diesel cars. Maruti’s best selling diesel cars include Maruti Swift diesel, Maruti Swift Dzire diesel and recently launched Ertiga diesel. Meanwhile, the best selling petrol cars by Maruti are Maruti Alto and Maruti Wagon R.